


Commonality

by Tierfal



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Gen, General, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-28
Updated: 2010-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martha has a question.  The Doctor has a lot of answers he doesn't give.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Commonality

The first time they have a moment to breathe in the wake of the Sontarans, Donna sets them down at a little table outside a coffee shop and goes in to order for them. She doesn't even ask the Doctor what he wants, and he waits to grin until after she's disappeared through the door with a cheery jingle, because she'd smack him upside the head if she thought he was laughing at her.

Martha leans forward and traps him with her eyes before he's even stopped smiling. The Doctor thinks _Mayday_.

"There's something I still don't get," Martha says.

There's always something.

"What's that?" he asks.

Martha frowns. "The Master," she says, and he keeps his expression very clear. "I've thought about it a lot—all the time; it sneaks up on me—but I just can't understand…"

He shifts. "Can't understand what?"

Her eyes are unrelenting. "Why you forgave him."

The Doctor crosses his legs and folds his arms, and then he takes a deep breath. "You know," he tells her, "how everyone says things like 'I wouldn't sleep with you if you were the last person on Earth'?" He considers. "Well, everyone except Jack does."

Martha raises her eyebrows. "I've heard that. So what? He gets amnesty because of his species?" Her face darkens, and her fingers clench in her jacket. "The things he did? To Earth, to my family, to _you_? And you let that go. Just dropped it. I thought you didn't give second chances."

The Doctor closes his eyes for a moment. "Martha, if there were two humans in the entire universe—if that common humanity was the only thing between you and being alone, completely alone, in a cosmos big enough to swallow you whole and forget you ever were—would it matter what that other person had or hadn't done? If, whatever they were guilty of, they were the only living thing in that infinite space who looked like you, thought like you, shared your history and spoke your language—wouldn't common humanity be enough?"

Martha looks out over the street, down the sidewalk, into the shop, around this world overrun with her kind, with her distant cousins, with innumerable unmet friends. She looks back to him where he sits stranded in their midst, surrounded, invisibly foreign, ill-fitting and unreconciled. He's shown her a universe where mishaps and mistakes are frequent and certainly dangerous, but everything works out in the end. She walked this world of hers when it was decimated, but she's never seen it empty, and she can't imagine all of this unlimited life ceasing to exist. He can see in her eyes that she's comfortable again, and she's already started to forget.

He's glad of it, because no one should have to remember the things she's done and seen because of him, but she won't be able to understand.

He just smiles at her, a lopsided smile of apology that she does recall, and she automatically smiles back. He doesn't tell her about the world he had before, the world he could have had, the world full and brimming with warmth and possibility—doesn't tell her about Koschei; doesn't tell her about Theta breaking both of his own hearts and crushing them under his heels on the way out the door. He doesn't tell her about the universe he believed in then, the vastness and the wonder and the hope. He doesn't tell her about the sweet, sardonic, brilliant boy he knew and had and wounded knowingly, and he doesn't tell her about the centuries they passed in opposition, and he doesn't tell her about the times survival bound them close. He doesn't tell her that the Master has been the only constant, excepting the Daleks, for nine hundred years. He doesn't tell her that his enemies outnumber his allies, or that he'd choose the Master's bitter, justified hatred over any human's love. He doesn't tell her that wrapping his arms around the broken man on the _Valiant_ was the first thing in centuries that felt like home.

"Doctor," Martha says, a tremor in her voice.

He blinks and focuses, and he sees that he's drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

His hand goes still—and then a paper coffee cup slams down beside it, and Donna collapses into the chair to his right.

"It's chai," she says. "You'll like it. And if you don't, order me something I'll hate next time. You owe me three pounds, by the way."

The Doctor sips at his coffee demurely, hiding a smile behind the rim. Sometimes this empty universe seems a little more worthwhile.


End file.
